This autumnal offering comes from deliberately getting lost in what lies below the surface—collapsing into the disorientation of a fall garden, its disheveled disposition a mirror and an active, functional process of transformation in stages.

It’s there that hidden colors surface—wondrous golds, oranges, reds, and magentas tangled with the many shades of earth-toned decay. These pigments exist year-round, but as days grow cooler and shorter, fall slows the labor of growth, allowing these lower-lying, subtle yet potent colorations to rise into view and reveal what lives just beneath the surface. Fall’s brief spectacle grants us entry to the inner layers; this collection comes from that within.

In the Fall garden’s maturation, rot and decay I find directions for slowing down, letting go, and the acceptance of dormancy and stillness to come as part of a cycle of renewal. This collection is essentially speckles of trust in the cycles of nature, gathered from this year’s fall garden, and returned to me through flavor.

I feel my form drifting—less refined, more instinctive. Like me, it’s all softening. The refinement I’d been chasing for others gives way to something more organic and purer. It feels like wisdom and confidence melding into form—yet circular, echoing the early herbal salt magic of my youth—texture rising, fruit clumping, herb shards larger, more unapologetic. It’s untamed, patterned like the garden in its current chaos. Closer to nature. Maybe truer than the rest.

The slow alchemy of fall holds my hand—roasting, sautéing, caramelizing, baking; flavors embedding until they fuse and bloom. Threads of sensations of the methods themselves are jarred and tinned up—heat-born, deep, layered, smoky, sweet, and slow.

Quintessential fall staples like earthy sage; soft, pungently sweet marjoram; and potently peppery marigolds ripple and dance throughout the collection, yet a bevy of surprising green offerings appear from every season—volunteer shoots of vibrant mint bring a warmth only possible now. New blooms of the hardiest flowers, like crimson red roses, offer a sultry fruitiness in the thrusting last chances of the season. Winter wild chicory darts up early, perhaps as a reminder that cycles aren’t often precise. Everything is fully alive, evoking the more uncommon facets of sensual beauty — the kind that lives on the edge of decay.

Spent cinnamon basil blooms are an abundant and forceful reminder of this beauty. On the outside, they resemble wilted flowers on the brink of shedding their seeds and fading away. They seem to embody deep disorientation—neither fully flower nor seed—yet they hold the most remarkable, potent, warmly toasted pie-spice flavor and aroma.

Everything in this collection swirls between life and breakdown. The combinations are not so much my normal creative pairings, as they are purposely disordered, mirroring what nature illustrates. New techniques like drying pomegranate arils, caking bone broth powder or dipping amaranth and rose petals in vinegar reveal my purposeful use of unseen transformations laden throughout the collection—designed to expand my own possibilities of mind and flavor, to regenerate an openness that feels obligatory in this season of being.

Autumnal flowers blanket each offering—mature, withered to only a tinge of life, some even dried in place—yet none waver from exposing the vibrancy of the death-and-rebirth process. Their colors are evidence of the joy that came before, and of how evolution sinks that joy into wisdom, maturity, and a wider, more inclusive cycle.

This collection exposes the underbelly of fall’s frailty yet remains tethered and grounded in the comfort of trust: sage, thyme, rosemary, bay. Persimmon, maple, green bean, and pie spice. It’s earthy, vegetal, and reminiscent of a Thanksgiving full of family and love—one we dream of yet never quite reach. The comfort feels fragile, purposefully releasing into ambiguity—designed to teeter between fleeting glimmers of certainty and uncertainty, between creativity and herd mentality.

This collection is both a study and a surrender to the garden’s visual and sensory infidelity, where nothing stays what it seems, and to my own movement through a season that asks for the same surrender. These salts are that act made physical—the taste of getting lost, the texture of becoming undone, the flavor of transformation mid-process. They are a loss of direction and yet a clear path to growth ahead. They are the threshold between what’s dying and what’s becoming.

I meander off script with two non-salts: my Cinnamon Basil Vanilla Pie Spice, made from toasted spent cinnamon basil blooms; and a peppercorn version, a medley of peppercorns doused in that same spice as a bonus for those purchasing the full Fall Collection.

This season’s offering tenderizes not only food but perception—softening what’s rigid, loosening what’s known, bringing peace in confusion. Chaos becomes nourishment, confusion shapes into simply being. Fall’s disorientation isn’t dysfunction—it’s recalibration. Like decay, this collection feeds what’s next, drift with it and see what happens.

Use generously and creatively.

LEARN MORE ABOUT MY HERBAL SALTS
*Herbal Roots herbal salts are crafted and available seasonally: Spring, Summer, Fall & Winter.

Returns & Refund Policy     |     Herbal Roots Herb Salt Reviews